Processing Remote Files
Introduction
The ability to handle remote files as easily as files on the local
hard-drive is a key feature required to automate many types of data
processing tasks in organizations. Ferrite supports the following
URL-based schemes for specifying remote files (or locations) as input
to a workflow:
- HTTP: Files on the web
- HTTPS: Including secure locations
- FTP: Suppors both anonymous FTP locations and secure FTP servers
requiring login with a username and password.
Eliminate Manual Downloads
Being able to transparently handle remote files means complete
elimination of the requirement to download files manually. This has
many benefits including:
- No more stale data files. Specifying a remote location as input
to the workflow means the file is downloaded when the workflow is
executed thus ensuring that the latest available data is processed.
- Completely eliminate manual download thus freeing up valuable
manual resources for other tasks.
Create a Workflow
Remote locations can be specified as input while processing text
documents or CSV documents.
- To process one or more text documents, select Create -> Text
Processor from the main menu.
- Select the project where the workflow is to be created and click
Next.
- Specify a name for the workflow and click Next to select the files to
process.
- For more details on creating a workflow, check out the Getting Started
tutorial.
Selecting Files
The File Selection wizard is shown below. Click "Add Local File" to
select files from the local harddrive. Click "Add Remote Location" to
open up a Remote Location Wizard.
Specifying a Remote Location
The Remote Location Wizard is shown below. Enter a URL and click
"Verify" to check that the URL has been correctly entered.
Browsing Remote Locations
An URL can be entered in the location box and verified by clicking on
the "Verify" button. A sample is shown in the screenshot below. For
URLs which return HTML, the HTML source is shown.
The following screenshot shows a remote file being viewed in the
browser.
Example URLs
Some examples of specifying URLs for processing:
- An example of a website ("http") URL:
http://www.XGrep.com/samples/classic.txt
- A secure website URL: https://www.citibank.com
- An anonymous FTP URL:
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/faqs/LEGO-faq
- An FTP URL for a server which requires authentication (login)
using a username and a password is specified as:
ftp://username:password@hostname.com/path/to/file;
for example,
ftp://tsmith:secure@xgrep.com/samples/classic.txt
File Selection
The following screenshot shows a remote file which has been selected
for processing.
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